Learn Advanced Penetration Testing in 5 minutes!!!

Cyber Space:


We shop online. We work online. We play online. We live online. More and more, our lives depend on online, digital services. Almost everything can be done online – from shopping and banking to socialising and card making – and all of this makes the internet, also known as cyberspace, an attractive target for criminals.

 What is Cyber Security or Information Security?

The knowledge, tools and best practices relating to protecting the computers, communications networks, programs and data that make our digital lives possible are collectively referred to as cyber security, or information security.

Cyber security is definitely one of those areas where you need to evaluate the validity of any information you find online before accepting it.

Attackers are constantly finding new vulnerabilities and ways of attacking computer systems. Therefore, it is important to keep yourself informed and up to date with threats that are relevant to your situation.


CIA

The guiding principles behind information security are summed up in the acronym CIA (and we’re pretty sure there’s a joke in there somewhere), standing for confidentiality, integrity and availability.
We want our information to:
  • be read by only the right people (confidentiality)
  • only be changed by authorised people or processes (integrity)
  • be available to read and use whenever we want (availability).

Understanding current threats

Now you know what information assets you have, you’ll look at how those assets can be compromised.
You will learn about some different kinds of threat, the vulnerabilities that they exploit and some countermeasures that can be put in place to guard against them. When we use those terms we mean:
  • Vulnerability – a point at which there is potential for a security breach
  • Threat – some danger that can exploit a vulnerability
  • Countermeasure – action you take to protect your information against threats and vulnerabilities.


Attackers are constantly finding new vulnerabilities and ways of attacking computer systems. Therefore, it is important to keep yourself informed and up to date with threats that are relevant to your situation. source: FutureLearn
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A penetration test, or the short form pentest, is an attack on a computer system with the intention of finding security weaknesses, potentially gaining access to it, its functionality and data.
Source: Wiki

Penetration Testing is the most interesting domain for security enthusiast. A scope of penetration test will vary from client to client.  

Two types of penetration testing:

1. Internal Penetration testing
Should act like Insider in the company and behave like a Malicious Employee or attacker

2. External Penetration Testing
Should attack the target assets via Internet

A Stages of Penetration Testing:

1. Pre Engagement Stage

In this stage,  an undisclosed agreement signed between the tester and the company.

  • Understanding the business goals and values of the client
  • Make sure the company belongs to the client  
  • Client requirements for pentest
  • Convenient time for attack and not in busy hours
  • Real time attack is must or not
  • Proof of Exploits or only identifying the vulnerabilities is enough
  • Time period for the project
  • Written Approval statement to test the company assets in the third party systems
  • Point of contact - person in the company in case of emergency issues
  • Social-Engineering is must or not
  • Client should agree upon the method of report that we submit
  • "Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Letter" from client 


2. Information Gathering

  • Collecting the information about the target via Internet
  • Collecting the DNS and IP information
  • Any information that can be used for hacking

3. Threat Modeling

  • with collected information and designing the attack plan to perform the successful exploits 
  • Think like a Hacker 

4. Vulnerability Analysis

  • Running the Vulnerability scanner to identify the vulnerable apps and services running in the target machine
  • Collect list of applications and services running in the target systems


5. Exploitation

  • Using the known vulnerability, exploiting the target system with payloads 
  • Finding the techniques to exploit the unknown vulnerability and if possible writing exploits to take down the system

6. Post Exploitation 

  • After successful exploitation, analysing the valuable assets and information that can be collected from the target system
  • Classifying the informations assets value and impact towards the company business


7. Reporting

  • This is the final phase of penetration testing where we have to submit two types of report summary to our client
  • Executive Summary: This describes the goals of test and offers the high level overview of the findings
  • Technical Summary: This describes the technical details of the test
For more information on pentesting, a good place to start is the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) at http://www.pentest-standard.org/. 



 I have learned these things from
http://www.cybrary.it/course/advanced-penetration-testing/ and Penetration Testing book written by Georgia Wiedman

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